THPStrength

John: 00:00

I was born ready.

Isaiah: 00:01

What's up, everybody? My name is Azeri Rivera. Highest vertical jump in the world officially tested. This is my coach, John Evans. This is Austin Burke, also jumps extremely high.

Isaiah: 00:10

We all jump really high, actually. And we've more importantly been able to improve from being good to better and better and better, which is harder to do than just getting a beginner better. Which, by the way, today we're gonna show you something that is gonna increase your genetic potential. Yes. You should be periodizing your training as a beginner.

Isaiah: 00:30

That way you can have a higher ceiling. We're gonna show you exactly how to do that by first covering a topic called macrocycles. Alright? Before we get into it, if you do wanna get coached by us to jump higher, you can go to thpstrength.com and use the code THP for 10% off of your first month. Having said that, John, first off, what is periodization and then what is a macrocycle?

John: 00:51

So periodization is planning. That's all it is. It means you structure your training into certain periods of time, and then over those periods of time, you have changes that happen to allow for maximal adaptation. And a macro cycle is the largest functional building block of periodization.

Isaiah: 01:09

It is the yeah. So it's like Lego pieces. And this is the big the biggest Lego piece.

John: 01:14

Biggest Lego piece. Or it's like it's like when you look at the whole plan, this is like.

Isaiah: 01:18

Or it's one big Lego piece. It's one big Lego piece and it's got little Lego pieces Exactly. Inside of

John: 01:23

Yeah. That's maybe a better way. Like what are those little dolls?

Isaiah: 01:25

Or actually, you know, little Or a puzzle. It's like a big puzzle. Yeah. This is the whole puzzle.

John: 01:29

You know? So quickly, macrocycle typically is a year long, and mesocycles are typically a month. Microcycles are a week. We'll get into those another time. We're just gonna cover macrocycles here.

John: 01:40

Gonna try to do it clear, concise, and concretely. So I have a couple concepts that I wanna discuss during this. One is the goal of a macro cycle, and that is to plan when you are going to peak, whether that is going to be in a three month period of time, six month, one year, two year, three year, four year. Isaiah, what was your experience you talked about on the call today?

Isaiah: 02:00

Yeah. Somebody asked me on a group call, which, by the way, you get four.

John: 02:05

Hey. Oh, we're good. Do you need us to move?

Isaiah: 02:06

No. I don't know.

Austin: 02:08

The garbage man? What? Yesterday. Yeah.

Isaiah: 02:19

Oh, that's weird. It's filled with water, so I

Austin: 02:21

think that that's what it might be. Oh, might have been

John: 02:23

too heavy. Yeah. Yeah. It might have been too heavy. Alright.

John: 02:26

Thank you. Sorry about that. Alright. Alright. Get back to it.

Isaiah: 02:30

Yeah. So and one of the group calls, which by the way, you get four group calls with each one of us, when you sign up for THP. One of the athletes we train asked me, do I do what what is it called? The shakeout. Do I do a shakeout before I'm gonna deload or before my session during the deload week?

Isaiah: 02:49

And I told them that I used to do a shakeout pretty religiously, once a month during my deload week, but now I don't care. I do not care about my performance, after a mesocycle is over. What I care about is how I perform at the end of the macro cycle. So my overall time frame on how I look at my training and when I perform has been zoomed out a lot. I used to care even be when I before I started training with John, I used to care about my performance session to session Yeah.

Isaiah: 03:16

Day to day. And that

John: 03:17

was That was very hard habit to me.

Isaiah: 03:19

And and there would be depression, dunk depression, when I would have a bad dunk session after training all week. And I'd be like, John, why am I jumping lower? I I used to think you'd have to jump lower. You know, you'd have to jump well every session. To get better.

Isaiah: 03:31

Yeah. So that was a belief that was broken. Then what I broke later on was, it doesn't even matter if I train for a month and I jump well. I don't even care about that anymore. Now it's, I'm gonna train hard as hell for six months, not care about how I do there in those six months, and then I peak.

Isaiah: 03:47

And that's usually how long my macrocycles are now. We do we basically peak two times per year. One time in the winter, one time in the summer, and that's usually when I test my vertical and aim to have my actual highest jumps and break my previous PRs. Aside from that, I do not carry how I perform.

John: 04:03

And that really challenges the assumption. And this assumption, I feel like a lot of people have, Stephen Sully had this assumption the first time I talked to him, and that is that you should always be jumping your highest. You should always be getting better. You should always be a better organism or a better product. If you train, that training should result in you jumping higher immediately.

John: 04:21

And if it doesn't, then it's not effective. And every time you go through a strength cycle, power cycle, speed cycle, you are a better product and your vertical will never go down again. And that assumption is untrue. If you were to look at some of the old training videos that Stephen Sully puts up, he would talk about, well I'm a strength phase, I'm in a power phase, I'm a jumping phase, or whatever else. That's like how he would kind of break it up.

John: 04:43

And he would think like, I always should be jumping my highest in this given phase, and I should never be moving backwards ever. The reality is is that's not true. Your biology is this fluid thing that is always going up, and it's always going down. It changes minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. The point of cycling and periodization is to allow yourself to have the best biological advantage when you want to be performing your best.

John: 05:08

That's what track and field athletes do when they go to the Olympics, which is a quadrennial macro cycle. It's what Isaiah does every three to six months. Typically, it's biannually, so we have two macrocycles, and you could even call those if you wanted, you could call them like I don't even know. You could maybe call it something the whole year or something different. But typically, that's what I use is a two peak year, and I usually peak in the winter, and I usually peak in the summer.

John: 05:33

And the reason why is because dunking is arbitrary, meaning there's no competitive cycle saying this is when you wanna peak, which is why peaking is I guess I had it on the other side of the board, but peaking is really what the purpose of macrocycles is. The purpose is to figure out when you want to be at your absolute best. So this is relevant because if you're going to dunk camp, this is literally what we wanna see happen in the next week or two realistically. And then maybe a second peak a month later, but we'll get into that maybe another There

Isaiah: 06:01

are early signs. If you've been watching the videos I've been putting up, I'm jumping the highest I have all year, which aligns with what is supposed to be happening. Arguably, it might have happened a little too early. Yeah.

John: 06:11

We're we're testing something else with Isaiah. We're trying to increase his jump volume and do a functional overreach ahead of camp. So specificity is at its highest, intensity is at its highest, and volume is relatively high for that specific quality, but the overall volume is really low. His volume in the weight room's low. His volume of moving in general is relatively low.

John: 06:32

But when he does move, it's really, really intense shit. And in the weight yeah. It's quick. See that? It's kinda scares you.

John: 06:38

And when you're in the weight room, even in the weight room, he's gotten more general in the weight room. We're really just doing general Stay healthy. Squats, stay healthy. Yeah. It's not there's no specific training stimuli in there.

John: 06:47

And try to maintain power output with cleans. So one of the things you wanna see when you're looking at a macro cycle year to year is that the workload increases. Meaning, if I am looking at Isaiah from 2020 to 2024, I know that the year of 2020, he did way less load volume relative to the total amount that he's done in 2024. So if you were to take all the reps and all the all the weight that he did for each individual rep and you multi multiply those by each other and then added them all up, his workload in 2020 should be significantly less compared to what it is now. Annually or macro cycle to macro cycle, if you're using a year long plan, you usually wanna see a five to 10% change in workload.

John: 07:29

So his workload every year should climb up. This kind of comes down to this bottom point here which is beginners versus elites. If you're an elite athlete, there is a point of diminishing returns where you won't be able year to year to increase the amount of workload. So if you're in this for the long haul, if you want to make long term athletic developments, and you wanna reach your true genetic potential, then you need to keep that in mind when you're planning training from month to month, year to year, and biannually to biannually. And then if you're looking at how long each one is, we talked about that, it should be anywhere from three months to four years, but you could do a two month macro cycle if you really wanted and run those all the time.

John: 08:07

It's whatever you want. It's just commonly you're gonna need at least three months to get a considerable amount of progression in that period of time where you adapt to actually build up adaptation. And in a four year example, like if you're quad quadrennial cycle or an Olympic cycle for macro cycles, what that is is like if I'm an Olympian, I know I compete in 2020 and I compete in 2024. So if Isaiah knows he has four years and he has world championships maybe every year, maybe we do a little peak each time for that. But my big, big goal is in 2024, he's jumping highest or higher than he's ever been.

John: 08:43

If you look at track and field athletes, when do they typically run their absolute fastest? The year either before or during the Olympics? The next year after an Olympic cycle is generally not that impressive, but the year of is when you see a lot of those world records get broken, and that's because the coach is well, good coaches should be trying to get their athletes to perform their absolute absolute absolute best in an Olympic year, in a competitive year. So how does that change in terms of volumes and intensities? What you should see happen is that athletes who are gonna be performing at a higher level, their intensity climbs up year to year, their specificity gets increasingly more.

John: 09:19

So an elite athlete year to year, Isaiah has done more and more jumping at a higher level. His vertical has gone up, so he can perform higher outputs in his jump sessions. His power clean has gone up, so he can perform higher outputs in his power clean sessions. His back squat has gone up, so he can perform higher absolute weights in his back squat sessions. So year to year, again, workload is a function of intensity and volume.

John: 09:41

It's gone up every single year. That's how it's changed. Then if we look at volume, this the change in volume is relative to the workload. You typically can't have intensity climb up and specificity climb up and have volume climb So what I try to do, and some coaches probably have a nuance of this, is I try to maintain volume at least or maintain volume. So Isaiah, I'll ask you this.

John: 10:04

How do you think your volumes have changed or how have I manipulated volumes? And Austin, you might have an opinion on this as you guys have gone from beginner to elite. We talked about the intensity thing. I think that's pretty true. But how has volumes changed for you guys?

Isaiah: 10:15

Yeah. If you if you look at I started working with John doing full jump training, not just rehab for my knees around 2019. And if you compare my workouts, like a similar cycle to a summer cycle. So let's say a general cycle focused on hypertrophy work, the volumes have been insane. This last general cycle that I did back in April was ridiculous.

Isaiah: 10:37

And what's funny is that each year, I think it's ridiculous. But then the next year is always even more It's even harder. Even more ridiculous. So the volumes have the total workload itself is way higher. I also have gotten a lot stronger.

Isaiah: 10:50

So if you look at like the total is it poundage? Tauntage? I think

John: 10:54

it's tonnage is what you Tauntage? Wanna

Isaiah: 10:55

The total tonnage. So it's like sets times reps times weight lifted is insanely greater compared to even volume. Yeah. Low volume. So just two years ago even.

Isaiah: 11:08

So, yeah, there's definitely been a huge increase in in the total workload.

John: 11:11

And it's not perfect when you look at low volume because, like, what if you're doing an isometric and you're doing it for five seconds? Like, you can't really account for that. But Austin actually has a different experience. So Austin, you can take the mic now. When I started coaching you, what was your total workload, volume and intensity compared to even, let's say, like, a year or two ago?

Austin: 11:31

Oh, it was definitely way higher. Workouts probably lasted around, like, three hours?

John: 11:35

Were two two to three hours.

Austin: 11:36

Yeah. They were they were rough. Yeah. The intent like, the volume was just way higher. A lot more general work, a lot more bodybuilding circuits mixed in on the general like, the main lifts main lift days.

Austin: 11:46

Right? No. All of it. It was on every day? Yeah.

John: 11:48

No. No. No. No. I'm just saying what was general

Austin: 11:50

break it down. Yeah. I'm just gonna break it down. Yeah.

John: 11:52

I had sometimes I would put OLEs on every day, then sometimes I would put complexes back in. Some of those cycles got erased in the period of time of me switching jobs, so they don't exist anymore. But you can go back to the early cycles in '20 what was it? 2018, I think I have some that are still that are still saved that you can look at. Yeah.

John: 12:11

And they're vastly different. So you might be wondering, well, John, that doesn't follow this year to year workload change. Why isn't he increased his workload year to year? And that's because the baseline I set, the standard I set was way way too intense, Way too much.

Austin: 12:25

Yeah.

John: 12:25

So Isaiah kinda helped me understand and Austin over the years have and coaching all the other athletes that what I expected of my athletes that my mentors taught me they could handle, most times athletes could not realistically handle. So I had the experience of working with Olympians, working with decathletes who are training two to three hours a day and can invest, you know, two hours in a general day and make that as important as their intense specific high intensity day. Over the years, that's changed a lot. So the one way in which maybe it does still apply, and this is goes back to what I said about beginners versus elites, is early on, how specific or how crazy were the types of training stimuli that I gave you guys? Like, just think of like a true squat for example

Austin: 13:08

Yeah.

John: 13:09

Compared to now. Right? Like when was the first year? How many years was it before you guys saw even a true squat in your training cycle?

Austin: 13:15

Probably like two years in, two or

John: 13:16

three Maybe two to three. Right? Yeah. And then what about have I even really employed plyos with you guys at this point?

Austin: 13:22

Very rarely for me.

Isaiah: 13:25

I mean, I've done, I think, two or three cycles where there's been plyos.

Austin: 13:32

Yeah. I think

Isaiah: 13:32

And I mean, if so from we I've been training with you for

John: 13:36

How many months of total?

Isaiah: 13:37

Five years five years now. That's sixty months.

John: 13:41

So out

Isaiah: 13:41

of 60 I've done three.

Austin: 13:44

Wait. I've completed one cycle of plyos the whole time I've been training

Isaiah: 13:47

with you. I did load management for that was, I think, the first time we ever did a plyo cycle. Do you wanna include barbell squat jumps when I did that, or are we talking true

John: 13:55

We're talking fucking plyos.

Isaiah: 13:57

Yeah. So We

John: 13:58

can think of one.

Isaiah: 13:58

Load management for

John: 14:00

For you.

Isaiah: 14:02

When I did depth jumps, this last time that was half a cycle. And then

John: 14:06

You did one session of maybe two sessions of

Isaiah: 14:08

And then what was the previous it was, like, earlier

John: 14:10

last year. I can think of a handful of

Isaiah: 14:12

Oh, and then in '29. And in '29, we did it yeah.

John: 14:15

I could think of of, like Carolina. You did half a cycle this past year of plyos, of, like, true plyometrics, what I would consider, like, traditional textbook plyos. You did a cycle in '29, one month of different types of depth jumps.

Isaiah: 14:29

I don't even know No. There was one where I did single leg hops. Like hops. And bounding.

John: 14:33

That was in

Austin: 14:34

That

Isaiah: 14:34

was in '29 as well.

John: 14:35

So you did that also when we lived in the

Isaiah: 14:37

In span of a year, there was two cycles there,

John: 14:39

like full cycles. That you did. You completed successfully.

Isaiah: 14:42

Two of them there. The Before that, I can't North Carolina. You didn't get

John: 14:46

through any plows there.

Austin: 14:47

Yeah. You did.

John: 14:48

What did you get through there?

Isaiah: 14:49

We were under the thingy, and we were doing, like, cops, like, doom doom doom.

John: 14:53

Oh, yeah. Yeah. But there was, like, two days that happened. I think it was, like, I remember vividly, like, two sessions it actually occurring, and it was capped intensely.

Isaiah: 15:00

And then during COVID, when my back was messed up, and CFO was messed up. I didn't remember that. I did something there. I can pull up the videos. Can pull

John: 15:07

the videos. But but off the top of our head

Isaiah: 15:10

It's about it averages out to, like, once a year. I I've done one full twice

Austin: 15:14

a year. I've done one full cycle. That was recently with you. Other than that, make a week through, and then

John: 15:18

I'm out. And the reason why is because intensity changes year to year and goes up and specificity goes up. So what has to happen

Isaiah: 15:26

It's true.

John: 15:26

It's really I know. It's really covering everything. So what has happened is as they've become more elite, those stimuli become more and more intense. And as I said, the change in intensity over time and specificity increases. One, I can't afford to have them do that year round because the intensity and specificity of jumping, their actual skill, is so intense.

John: 15:46

I can't do it all the time. And then two, if I were to have them do it more of the time, they would get hurt almost immediately. They just can't handle it. Their their outputs are too high and the requirement for them to stay healthy is either they drop their intent or they do such small seemingly ambiguous volumes that it's almost irrelevant. So it's either don't do it at all, do it half half acidly, or do really, really intense, very, very short small bouts.

John: 16:19

Now if they weren't doing dunk sessions, then I could probably get away with it. But at the end of the day, we dunk. I biggest mistake I ever made was doing too many plyos and not dunking enough. And I refused to make that mistake with all my other athletes because I did plyos all the time. But, yeah, that's pretty much all I have.

John: 16:35

Do you guys have anything else you wanna add? That covered it pretty

Isaiah: 16:38

pretty well.

John: 16:38

Make sure you guys go to thbsrength.com and sign up for coaching. If you wanna get coached by myself, Isaiah, and Austin. Also, make sure you like,

Isaiah: 16:45

subscribe, subscribe. That way you can find out when we talk about mesocycles,

John: 16:48

which is tomorrow. Yeah. That's the fun one. Alright. We'll see you guys.

John: 16:53

Bye.